History
Scientists believe that the barrier islands of the Outer Banks were remnants of the last Ice Age, which ended approximately 12,000 years ago. They have also concluded that Jockey's Ridge itself came into being about 7,000 years ago. The process of how this came about is unclear; however, scientists believe that minerals such as quartz were washed from the mountains of the state to the ocean, creating sand. This sand was pushed onto the beaches of the area by storms and hurricanes. Through a process known as saltation the sand was eventually blown onto the area now known as Jockey's Ridge where something caused it to begin building the dune system.
At one time, the dunes of the Outer Banks extended all the way to the southern end of Virginia. Many mariners used the ridge as a landmark in navigation of the area for coastal exploration in the 16th century. By the early 20th century, however, the Outer Banks had become a popular tourist area for visitors from the mainland. This in turn led to overdevelopment of the land. As development in the area proceeded, many local people desired the protection of the dune area. Action was precipitated in the summer of 1973, when bulldozing was begun on the sound side of Jockey's Ridge. Carolista Baum, a local resident, was made aware of the bulldozing by her children who were playing in the area. She confronted the operator of the machine and successfully demanded that it be shut down. Petitions soon began in an effort to "Save Our Sand Dune," and the organization "People to Preserve Jockey's Ridge" was formed. On July 25, 1974, Jockey's Ridge was approved for designation as a National Natural Landmark (see Nags Head Woods and Jockey Ridge NNL). With matching funds from the North Carolina General Assembly and the United States Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, approximately 152 acres (0.62 km2) were acquired in 1975 to create Jockey's Ridge State Park.
Read more about this topic: Jockey's Ridge State Park
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“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)